Why have I never heard of Edward Abbey?

I’m ​always pleased to discover a writer I’ve overlooked. How did Edward Abbey manage fly under my radar?  Environmentalist, anarchist, philosopher, renegade poet. His first book Desert Solitaire, an ode to Arches National Park, where Abby worded a park ranger for a number of seasons, had me hooked from the first page.

I spent several happy weeks on the trail of his other works. Dessert Solitaire, by far my favourite, is a love letter to the wide spaces of southeastern Utah. It is also lament against the encroachment of industrial tourism. Chiselled in between the lean and lovely prose are pithy observations about corporate America that might have been written today. The fact that he was writing in the 60s—Abbey was born in 1927 and died in 1989—makes his writing seem prescient.

What really captured my attention is his descriptive language, for example: “mesa, canyon and plateau [where] the pacific desert lies in whiskey-coloured light and lilac dust." His job as a park warden gave him plenty of time to absorb“stillness, solitude and space; an unobstructed view every day and every night of sun, sky, stars, clouds, mountains and canyons; a sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back; the discovery of something intimate—though impossible to name—in the remote.”

The enigma of the desert is something I have contemplated from my home in the grasslands of southern Saskatchewan. Abbey captures the ineffable. He was painfully aware of the limitations of experiencing the desert through mere human senses—man being the exploitative and destructive being he was—and wanted be part of what is not human and overcome anthropocentrism.  Writing about sandstone formations: “In deep stillness, in a sombre solemn light, these beings stand, the fins of sandstone hollowed out by time, the juniper trees so shaggy, tough and beautiful, the dead or dying pinyon pines, the little shrubs of rabbitbrush and blackbrush, the dried-up stalks of asters and sunflowers gone to seed, the black-rooted silver-blue sage. How difficult to imagine this place without a human presence: how necessary.  I am almost prepared to believe that this sweet virginal primitive land will be grateful for my departure and the absence of the tourists, will breathe metaphorically a collective sigh of relief-like a whisper of wind—when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy , anxious, brooding consciousness of man.”

It is unsurprising, then, that Abby chose to be buried in the desert in an unmarked place.

His backstory is arresting. He became prominent in the 80s, and was well-known for his environmental advocacy, particularly his scathing criticism of land use policies. He was clearly an “anti-establishment” figure, although before exploring the American southwest he had served as a military policemen in the U.S. army. He studied philosophy at the University of New Mexico, and spent a year at Edinburgh University as a Fulbright scholar. His Master’s thesis was on anarchism and the morality of violence. In it he asked: “To what extent is the current association between anarchism and violence warranted?”

Abby wrote eight works of fiction (several became movies) and a dozen non-fiction books. The Serpents of Paradise, a collection of essays and excerpts, roughly chronicles his writing career. From a Pennsylvanian farm boy to anarchist, from a naturalist to social critic, he went on to describe himself as “a man of small needs, infinite desires and philosophic pretensions.”  He was at times criticized as a misanthrope—which he rejected, insisting on his "hope for man, the fool”. Clearly he had little faith in humankind, in cities or in human ambition. “No matter in what nation I live I am certain I would find much to detest. All big social organizations are ugly, brutal, inhuman—prone to criminal acts which no man or community of men, on their own, would even think of. But just the same I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from hope. For me that’s patriotism.”

Antiwar, anti-God, anti-cattle industry, anti-immigration; Abbey rejected much of what America held dear. The Monkey Wrench Gang, a work of fiction, describes a gang of idealists who undertake to sabotage road-building equipment. It’s hard to imagine, given the great detail, that Abby himself didn’t take part in eco-terrorism. The FBI had him on a watch list and not only because Abbey hated road building--particularly roads that passed through his sacred desert spaces.

He saw roads and the tyranny of the automobile as the beginning of the end of these hallowed places. "No more cars in national parks,” he wrote. “We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they too, are holy places.” 

His suggestions on how to make parks accessible without roads is downright funny, but his intention is serious. He loathed tourists, especially those dependent on cars and roads, and described the new park campgrounds as suburban villages: “[These] elaborate house-trailers of quilted aluminium crowd upon gigantic camper trucks of Fibreglass and moulded plastic; through their windows you will see the blue glow of television sets and hear the studio laughter of Los Angeles.” His view of the damning of the Colorado, the flooding of the canyonlands, and sterility of Lake Powell, pulls no punches. On the American tendency to commodify nature and pander to the right, he wrote scathingly, “the voting bloc of Know Nothings [are] racially prejudiced, religiously bigoted, opposed alike to the graduated income tax, the United Nations, urban renewal, foreign aid, legislative reapportionment, public welfare, Medicare, and even free lunches for children.”

Yet as timely as these observations seem to me (especially in light of the political mayhem in the United States presently) I began to understand why Abby hasn't remained in the public eye. The more I read the more I gleaned the full-dimensional ma and the more I understood why some of his views were problematic.

He was deemed sexist, racist, and a dangerous subversive, and it's hard not to agree that his 
 attitude towards women was problematic.  To him, it seemed, women were pleasing ornaments at best (“at University of New Mexico I studied women”); at worst, they are objects to fulfil his basic needs. In a tale of a river expedition his only mention of his wife (number four or five) is that she was supposed to be "the succour of my old age" and he couldn't afford to lose her on the rapids. I suppose at one time this might have been a humourous comment.

An excerpt from his novel, A Fool’s Progress, about his pursuit of a woman, the ethereally named Claire, lapses into a sexual fantasy that is, frankly, as boring as it is demeaning of her. His tendency to red-necked recklessness include a description of shooting caged rabbits (“though we ate them,” he adds as if this ameliorates the offence). Other later diatribes do not show him in a flattering light. He was a staunch advocate of the 2nd amendment of the American Constitution, the right to bear arms. While I could get behind his disdain for the American pursuit of pecuniary happiness—“Business means America and America means business" (quoting from the U.S. Chamber of commerce) and even his lament about “the Sick Seventies" ("when even sex therapy and spiritual fulfilment are growth industries, The Serpentines of Paradise reveals Abby’s downward trajectory into hard-drinking radicalism. 

As he grew old and more jaded, less humourous and joyful in his dismissals and complaints, his writing became didactic. We see him, sick and struggling, on a river trip in Alaska, out of his element and hungry to see “GRIZZ,” like one of the tourists he despises.  On another river trip, alone and at the end of his strength, at the confluence of the Colorado and the Green Rivers, he this excursion would be his last. He became bitter. In the last two or three essays in 1988 he harangued Mexican immigrants, the cattle industry, women’s fecundity and overpopulation— with barely suppressed violence. 

So this is probably is why I'd never heard of Edward Abbey. In spite of a some pithy and well-versed observations, his attitudes are dated. He is a product of the 60s, and I suspect my personal library has many writers that will not, have not, stood the test of time.

Abbey was clearly at his best when he stayed in the desert. His descriptions of the canyonlands in autumn, or the desert ranges, are sublime. “Blue hills prickly with cactus, agave, spiny shrubs and stinging nettles, mostly bare of any vegetation at all, scaled and plated with loose rock, the high ridges notched with points like a dragon’s backbone.”  He writes of walking out into the badlands and seeing a single Indian paintbrush “lifting its cup of salmon-coloured, petal-like bracts toward the sky. The paintbrush too is beautiful, with the especial and extraordinary beauty of wild and lonely things. Every desert flower shares that quality. Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could lie, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rock and shifting sands, any such creature—beast, rid or flower—testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent of all forms of life.  Including the human. Even in us.”

This is the desert lands I recognize and the language I respond to. I'm not sure I'd have liked the man in person but there is much to commend in his writing. This presents the eternal question: is the art and the artist indivisible. His sensitivity to the landscape and his drive to preserve it are meaninful. “What does the desert mean?” he asked, and then answered his own question. “It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we living things—men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge—we were a part of it all. That should be enough.”


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